31
Want to check your rankings on Google.com, international Google search results, Yahoo, and Microsoft? Try Rank Checker, our free Firefox extension which tracks your rankings, and allows you to automatically check ranking changes over time.
If you have any questions please watch this video.
The tool has issues with special international characters, but we are trying to get that fixed ASAP. Have any other feedback? Please leave it in the comments below.
If you like it/find it useful, please show some love via a blog mention and on del.icio.us if you can. :)
[Update: to verify your rankings on a search engine you can scroll over the rank number, hold down control, and then click on the ranking.]
Subscribe to our blog via email or RSS to get more great posts like this one.
comments
Login or Register to post comments.
Nice extension! Couple of initial thoughts...
* Should the default delay be set to 2 sec rather than 0, as you recommend?
* I couldn't open the options menu (Tools > Rank Checker > Options) at first, because I already had the Rank Checker window open. Maybe there could be a way to open it direct from the main Rank Checker window, or show an error message if not.
* The results were slightly different to those I get when checking Google manually (with personalised search turned off). FWIW the SEOmoz rank checker correlates exactly with my manual checks.
Cheers again - look forward to using it!
Hi Stephen
The reason for the rank checking difference is because we group 100 results per page...and the clustering is different when you have 10 results per page or 100.
We could probably set result clustering / results per page as an option, but still like 100 as the default as it is much less likely to get you in trouble with Google because it requires far fewer queries to grab all the results, and still provides fairly accurate data.
Aaron,
Thanks again for working on this tool.
I agree that fewer queries is better. It would be great if theoptions allowed us to set the number of results per page and the number of pages to check. I'm typically only consider with rankings for a phrase within the first two pages of the result. Beyond page 2 is a clear enough signal that the phrase needs help.
The option to see 10 per page would bring the tool's results more in line with what a human user sees. The option to check just 2 levels deep would limit the number of queries.
Thanks.
Question I did use it and there is (in some cases) a difference in google rank checks vs. live results. I have seen you respond to this by stating that this is due to using 100 results instead of the 10 group however how does that account for it? Someone mentioned "Is it because you count the google sponsored links?" Is this the case, otherwise a great tool :-)
Just answered this here
http://www.seobook.com/announcing-firefox-rank-checker#31277
Keep in mind this tool only looks at organic search results...and does not rank AdWords ad positions.
Oh yeah, and why does the logo say Ronk Checker? ;)
The o key is right next to the a key on French keyboards and I wanted the typo traffic. ;)
Actually the end logo was my attempt at being artistic...I realize it was a slight miss on the A...but I wanted to feel like an artist for a day (please note that the a/o was made by someone else, and all I did was wrap the other letters around it).
Aaron, you're a star. I've been looking for an open source rank checker for a while now and this is the best one I've come across. Thanks for all the hard work.
Very nice, Thank you!!!!!
I may be hallucinating early in the morning. However, when I click on options, tasks, etc I don't get a pop up window. I'm using firefox on OSX 10.4.9
Looks like I need to test the options on my Mac downstairs. Be right back...
add more nations, for example add www.google.fr
to check the position of www.frescaliers.com on it
or italian wbe site, and other nations..
Google.fr is in there already.
Dexterity - check the first comment above. You need to close the Rank Checker window before opening the options menu. :)
A feature I would really really love from this, also not present in the tool I currently use for checking rankings:
Check the top *two rankings* per keyword.
i.e: If I have positions 2 and 3, or, position 7 and 12, I really want to know that!
Thanks for the tool anyway as it is!
Aaron,
This is amazing. I've been using 'Free Monitor for Google' for some time (Google it if anyone is not familiar), and it does not have anywhere near the amount of features that your tool does.
There is only one thing that I would find useful at the moment:
- The ability to click the headers (Google, Yahoo etc) and have the results sorted by ranking order.
Thanks Aaron - this will save heaps of time in the future...
That is a good idea. :)
Awesome stuff Aaron! Awesome Stuff!
First up, THANK YOU aaron, I've been waiting for something like this that is free and open source.
The one reason why I won't switch to using it just yet: I need 2 sets of results from google.co.uk - "all the web" (which are different results to google.com) as well as "pages from the UK" (which i believe is what is queried here).
The same goes for Yahoo and MSN - the US versions are unfortunately no good to me.
Any chance of adding this functionality?
I am not sure about international support of Yahoo! and Microsoft. I would be more inclined to deepen the Google support first because they have so much marketshare.
Aaron - thank you for the tool, I was looking for something nice and easy. I agree with another poster, it would be nice to see any additional placements for our keywords.
I did notice some variation between rank checker and live - thinking it is because sponsor sites are included in the count. Is this correct?
The reason for the rank checking difference is because we group 100 results per page...and the clustering is different when you have 10 results per page or 100.
We could probably set result clustering / results per page as an option, but I still like 100 as the default as it is much less likely to get you in trouble with Google because it requires far fewer queries to grab all the results, and still provides fairly accurate data.
thank you for your reply and explanation. Have a really great day. :)
This rocks, thanks.
Hi,
I run SEO tools all the time and get banned for a periods of time since Google (or Yahoo! or whatever) thinks I'm a bot (well, I am!).
Here is a suggestion that helps me (and possibly your tool)
What helps me to overcome getting banned for periods of time is to generate a list of available proxy servers in the region that I'm in (e.g., US), and then run my programs using round-robin scheduling to pick a proxy server.
Even though I do this, often times I've found out that Google is smart enough to figure out that I'm a bot so to overcome this problem what I do is to randomly generate a wait time between requests.
In your software, you can deterministically pick a time (e.g., 2 secs) before sending another request, but a better way of doing it (I have found) is to randomly generate wait times that are exponentially distributed (there is a reason why I'm using this distribution - the exponential distribution is "memoryless" distribution, so no correlation can ascertained between requests).
Anyway, to make a long story short, if you could include a formula (or an option) in your code for waiting times that looks like:
amt_of_tm_wait_before_next_req = -log(u) * avg_req_time
where u is a uniformly distributed rv between 0 and 1, then
what you would get are exponentially distributed wait times with mean avg_req_time.
EX: So, with the following code:
for (;;) {
u = unif()
amt_of_tm_wait_before_next_req = -log(u) * 2000
thread.wait(amt_of_tm_wait_before_next_req)
sendReq()
}
over a long period of time, your average wait before a request would be 2 (note the formula above generates a random variable (rv) so it is not always going to generate a "2").
All the above, I have found, makes it harder for Google to find out that your a "bot", but there are no guarantees, which is a pain.
Anyway, nice tool!
-
Thnx for the tips. :)
Thanks for this. This is a really useful extension.
I just noticed that when I set the delay (from say default of 0 to 2) and press OK, if I then go back to the options, it says 0 again. In other words, the delay does not seem to set (or at least the display always says 0).
This is in Firefox 3 beta 4.
Is there a limitation of 20 keywords when using "add multiple keywords"? I'm trying to paste 100 keyword in the box but only 20 of them are showing up in the main list.
ditto
I will try to extend it out to 100.
Great tool!!! The only issue is I have about 45 keywords for one site. I used the add multiple keywords, pasted them into the box (and confirmed they were all there), put our domain in, saved, and ran and only about 1/2 of the keywords ended up in the main list to be ran against.
Am I doing something wrong, or is there a maximum that can be added via the multiple keyword list?
I think we need to extend the list out to allow ~ 100 (or 150) maybe?
Thanks Aaron...
Thanks for the new tool Aaron.
I only have a couple of comments. Like mentioned in a post above, have you set a limit to the number of keywords that someone can add to a preset group? I have a fairly extensive list for one domain and it will not let me add more than 17.
The other things I was going to suggest is to make the window and the columns resizable. Maybe there is a reason everything is the way it is but I thought I would bring it up.
Once again, great work.
You really have excelled yourself this time Aaron.
Thank you.
Exactly what the doctor ordered.
DAK
Thanks Aaron. This new tool is awesome!
pmfiorini: good call on the random request time. My coder even used to run our requests through TOR which would make the request times appear random. These days I'm pretty sure Google knows where all the Tor exit nodes are so that might not work anymore.
In addition to this, I find it helps to have a private list of working proxies. Not all proxies are "working" (I define a working proxy as one which still allows a connection to a particular site, ie. google.com).
When using proxies, I've wondered if geotargeting causes different results to be served. In other words it might be nice to use a bunch of proxies located in roughly the same geographic area. It might pay to be selective when picking proxies.
On days when Google has Universal Search turned up to 11, I also find scraping for rank to be basically useless, as the results can change quite dramatically, multiple times in a single day.
All in all, Aaron this is an awesome tool and I think it is the start of something great. It is refreshing to see open-source SEO tools made available, especially in an industry that continues to foist expensive, buggy, closed-source products on the end user. Many thanks!
I've been fighting getting banned for what seems like forever and using round-robin scheduling of proxies has *really* helped. Performance of this type of app can also be better so since you can easily multithread it.
Sometimes, though, when Google is being especially nasty, I have to use the "nuclear option", and at that point, I have a list of Google data centers from which I randomly submit a query. I got the list from one of the Webmaster forums and just have it "hard-coded" in one of my programs.
The only problem is that you have to know where the datacenter is located because the search results can and will vary.
To answer one of your questions, when you query on Google using different proxy servers, you can get different results (for reasons similar to the above). For instance, you may issue your query in different country so you'll be served different results ("search quality" I suppose). Also, you should be aware that PR and other stuff can vary depending on the Google datacenter. This probably has to do with their distributed "updating" algorithm, which probably takes a long time (they have billions of stuff to update and index).
With regards to the proxies, what I do is use a program to generate a list, and then systematically go through them one-by-one to find out where they are located via their IP address (your can query the whois db or use a pre-made generated list). The next step is then "ping" them. Typically, I use a timeout between 2-5 ms, depending on how impatient I am on that day. Now you have a list of quick proxies and where they are located. You can then choose the location that you want to "query" and go nuts.
Anyway, I've spent a lot of time doing this and if anyone has easier/better/whatever ideas , I'd love to hear them.
Thanks - P
I downloaded this tool at the start of my work day and have used it quite a few times today.
Generally I dislike rank checkers because they kick out inaccurate results but I am quite impressed with this one, most results were accurate or at least in the area of 2-3 around.
Nice work Aaron, my suggestions follow for a few tweaks....
1) Agree with previous comment about "sort by ranking" for each search engine, very useful feature.
2) Would like to see traffic estimation data from your other tool tied in as an optional column
Good luck and thanks for continuing to contribute quality tools for free to the SEO community.
I think we will add this.
I can't get too aggressive with pulling in that other data though...it is licensed through a Wordtracker partnership, and those guys spend a lot of money on buying data and whatnot. Maybe I can link to my keyword research tool from this? Or the Google traffic estimator? Or both?
Hi, Aaron.
I'm having difficulty with the tool.
I've added the url and keywords, yet the start button at the bottom is grayed out and I can't click on it. Also, the save button is inactive as well as the add button (by inactive I mean nothing happens when I click, they are NOT grayed out though). The only buttons that do work are "open" and "clear."
I've tried uninstalling and re-installing to no avail.
Any tips?
Thanks,
Ken Lyons
Hi Ken
Do you have an options window open? If not there might be conflicting extensions.
Useful tool that just might render my proprietary software obsolete.
I sure wish I could resize columns - and the window itself, for that matter.
thanks for this. looks very nice.
This is excellent tool for all SEO users of all levels. Well done Aaron.
I really like this tool, it makes portions of my life much easier.
The only thing I found that I would want to add is the ability to check for a URL. I have a lot of social media profiles and things like that out there that rank well for my keywords. Regardless, thanks for the great tool.
Fails to show anywhere. The "Rank Checker" words do not appear anywhere on browser.
I am using Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.13) Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13
Cheers - D
Aaron,
I've reinstalled the tool again and my grayed-out start button issues have been resolved.
Chock it up to gremlins.
Thanks, great tool,
Ken Lyons
Great tool thanks Aaron.
It seems to be inaccurate by 1 or 2 positions, even when I manually check with 100 results per page. Possibly due to how it counts Google local results?
Also, if I have several keywords, and try to bring up the actual results (double clicking the URL in Rank Checker), it uses the same keyword and produces the same set of results for each keyword (eg when I click the URL for keyword1, it brings up results for keyword1 (correct), when I click the URL for keyword2, it brings up results for keyword1 (incorrect)).
Also, I added google.ca, and when I export the results to csv, the 'google.ca position' heading is in the same cell as the 'google.com url' heading, and then all subsequent headings are 1 cell too early, ('google.ca url' heading is above the 'google.ca position' column etc)
Thnx for the feedback. :)
Aaron
Once again you continue to add value to the web. You amaze me that you give this stuff away for free!
If you ever want some free graphic design for your tools you release I'd be happy to help out...(my new designer is one talented girl ;)
Thank you so much for your hard work.
Hey Aaron
I installed the plugin and restarted FireFox. When i tried to configure it, i had just a tiny image at the center of my screen. When I expanded this, it was a page with a message indicating that it couldn't access /home/anthony/.mozilla/blah/rankchecker@seobook.com/rackchecker.jar/!Contents/blah
The rankchecker@seobook.com had 400 permission... and there was no rankchecker.jar. It was in fact, named RankChecker.jar. Not a problem on winders, but no workie on Linux. I copied RankChecker.jar to rankchecker.jar and things started working.
Otherwise, I'm looking forward to another nice SEO tool.
Thanks!
Anthony
So the capitalization messed it up, eh? Thanks for that tip Anthony...will try to get it fixed.
So if I'm using this tool from a static IP (like a corporate firewall) and I get "banned" by Google, what does that mean? Will I still be able to perform searches on Google with my normal browser? Would it affect other users also sharing the same public IP address?
I might not suggest using such a tool aggressively from behind a corporate firewall. If your typically query volume is high that probably gives you some good cover for aggressive usage, but you do not want to use it so aggressively that they end up blocking you.
So the results are not even matching up (anywhere close) if I switch to 100 results per page. For example, this tool reports 27 for my search phrase. I verify that in Google at 10 results per page and I rank 17. I change preferences to display 100 results per page and I rank number 9. Now if only I can get everyone defaulting to 100 results per page :)
You also have to look at search personalization as well. It might be changing your rankings.
Aaron,
I've been looking into automated rank checkers for a while now.
Why wouldn't Google advocate a paid datacenter to let these tools hit? That way we're not inflating search volumes or tying up their free resources.
Sorry for such a noob question.
Hi Brian
They generally hate SEO and want to make you need to violate their TOS to be an effective SEO. At one point in time they did offer a useful API, but they then took it away in favor of a not so good one.
"Yo, yo, yo - my bad dogg" - Randy Jackson
This thing is right on if you take into account 100 results per page (which I understood before running). I just don't count indented results when I do my manual checks and you never see that many indented results when you're using 10 results per page as your default.
I can still see how this tool is useful to monitor change automatically and consistently to keep you on top of any big changes.
I have to give you my respect for ease of use and implementation and the dedication you spend monitoring your blog.
Congratulations on making it into the top ten blogs that I have to check every week.
udaman
Hi Aaron, first of all: thank you very much, this is a great plugin! So far i'm using a freeware desktop application (AB Google Rank) to do the job, but it doesn't have the automatic function and it's not as nice to use. But it has one feature i really like. it tells me, the change to the last update and the alltime high. I'd love to see this in this plugin, it would make it perfect!
This is awesome, Aaron...
Thanks for putting it together.
You just saved my clients a ton of money and me a lot of time. Thank you very much for this Aaron!
Thanks Aaron, great tool!
I just noticed that it finds www and non-www versions as different sites - is that how you wanted it to be or? And no, there isn't a 301 redirect to one of the versions.
P.S. Sorry if that has been already asked - didn't have the time to read ALL comments..
I wanted it different like that...it makes it more elegant in allowing you to test different subdomain locations.
Nice tool, I'd also like to have the option to limit search results to a country so UK only in google.co.uk, sites in German in google.de etc.
Nice, but here are some problems and suggestions
1) don't make the domain name to track case sensitive "Site.com" returns no ranking for any keywords the site actually does rank for. It's only indexed as "site.com" (all lower-case)
2) Once entered, only the option to delete and re-add again does exist, no edit option. This is annoying in combination with 1) and in also messy, because of 3)
3) I clicked on the column headings and thought that it will sort my lists by that, but this is not the case. The order of domain-keyword pairs depends entirely on the order you entered them into the tool. You can export and sort it in Excel or whatever, but it looses value as a quick checker tool for "on the road".
Nice tool though, just a little rough and unpolished yet. :)
p.s. Your Login/Register links at the blog got also smaller. I had a hard time finding them and only kept looking, because I knew that they must be there. They are harder to find now, because of the advertisement that follows right after the comments in the same style and thus blend into each other.
Cheers!
Carsten
Hi,
Great tool thanks!!
I didn't find any comments on this yet, but I am unable to save a preset. When I press save it says enter preset name, but when I look in open it doesn't show any.
Any solutions?
Thanks
Hi Aaron
First thanks for the tool. I think it can be really useful. However, I see one issue with the Google.es search.
I'm searching for several sites with only one keyword. I know for sure that they rank #1 for that keyword (not personalized). Even they have been ranking #1 for that keyword for years. But I think that there is some trouble with some sites that have sitelinks and this #1 position is not shown.
For instance, I seached for the name of my site. It finds the #2 result, the indented one, but omitted number #1, the home page and its sitelinks
I can provide you with the name of the site and the other examples. I'm not sure if I can post links or you could consider I'm trying to do promotion.
Thanks
Hi been using the tool this afternoon to check through a few things. One thing I've noticed:
If the top search result has those 'sub-links' underneath it, I think it's being ignored by the tool and saying that it doesn't rank.
For example, plug into the tool the search term 'news' for the domains, 'news.bbc.co.uk' and 'dailymail.co.uk'. You will find that it ranks dailymail.co.uk as no.1 despite news.bbc.co.uk being number one when you run the search.
I discovered this with one of the sites I work on, as it was telling me that I was ranking no.1 but when I ran the search even with 100 results, I was no.2. The number one search result had the 'sub-links' underneath it.
Hopefully you'll know what these 'sub-links' I'm talking about (Called Sitelinks in Google webmasters).
Let me know if this bug rings true.
Thanks for this feedback...we will look into it. :)
FireFox 2.0.0.7
OSX 10.4.10
That looks like a great tool and a good alternative to SEOmoz's Rank Checker, however I'd need international support for Yahoo and Live for it to be useful for me.
Could you apply this wonderful tool for Yahoo JAPAN Search, too?
I'm a Japanese webmaster!
Nice tool. I also thought it said RONK... figured it was an April fools day joke (c:
This tool appears not to work in Linux. I uninstalled all other extensions, tried multiple themes (including the default) to no avail.
I tried it on the following:
Firefox 2.0.0.13 on Xubuntu 7.10 for 1386
Firefox 1.5.0.12 on Kubuntu 6.06 LTS for i386
Firefox 2.0.0.13 on Kubuntu 7.10 for AMD 64
The same thing happened each time. I couldn't see the extension in the add-ons menu, also when this extension is installed it stretches out the statusbar area- so I'm assuming it just doesn't run in *nix natively.
Linux support would be really nice to have for this (otherwise awesome) tool (pretty please).
RE Linux -
confirmed - doesn't work with Ubuntu/Firefox. Bummer - I have moved my home computer (where I do freelance SEO and web stuff) over to Ubuntu. A fix for this would be great.
Hi Ian
one of the filenames was capitalized and does not work on Linux...we are trying to get that sorted ASAP.
Thank you.. sorry about that.. closing the window helps :) sorry aaron for making u run downstairs :)
thank you! very nice site ...
Hi Aaron,
I haven't used this tool, yet (sick right now and not much time..), but have you thought about visualizing the data so that you could click on a keyword and see a graph of the keywords rankings over time? I think that could be very interesting to look at (for algorithm testing, etc.)
(sorry in case you did show that somewhere in the video I fast-forwarded a bit of it and might have missed it)
This is a good idea, though I am not sure how easy this is to do, and there are easier fixes that we should make first.
Wow! that rocks.
I was going to purchase clicktracks as and analytics tool that had that as a feature. Although, you needed a google API for it to give the google rankings.
Ofcourse google stopped giving out those kind of APIs. So I never bought it.
Thank God. It was $$$.
This tool looks great I am installing it now.
Thanks, Colbs
Good morning. First off, let me say I love the Rank Checker tool. Being that my job is in Online marketing, this really helps my company see how much our SEO is adjusting rankings. The problem I am having is that most of our URL's are VERY long and there is a character limitation on the URL. Therefore, it simply isnt allowing us to search those URL's. Any help you can offer would be great. Thank you so much.
How long are your URLs?
video really appreciate
from IMASEO
Pretty long. :)
I work for Starwood Hotels & Resorts and we have long property websites. Here are 2 examples of our URL's for our hotels:
http://specialoffers.starwoodhotels.com/The_Westin_Key_West/index.htm
or
http://specialoffers.starwoodhotels.com/westin_aruba/so.htm
you only need to list the domain name...not the whole URL. and if you want to look for subdomains you can do that too, but no need for the /folder/file.htm part
also the http:// is not needed
Aaron, I apoligize if I am asking too many questions. The problem with the way our properties set-up is they are all built in subfolders. I don't pull the sub folders then it will only pull the brand website. Otherwise it would pull the Starwood website and not the property site. You mentioned I could look for subdomains as well, how do you go about doing that. Anyway I try I cant seem to pull it. Thank you in advance for your help.
if you search for
specialoffers.starwoodhotels.com
that will show subdomain rankings even if you do not put the full path of the file in there.
Hi Aaron,
I was looking for a tool like this ! I intensively use Google Monitor and was wondering wether or not there was one also for Yahoo or Live. Your extension does it for free. That's great. I am less enthusiastic with the only 'one result' per keyword because i am used to see a list of some of my competitors.
Some suggestions:
-ability to plot a graph to monitor over time
-keyword import via text file
wonder if it is too hard to do : compare the keyword ranking to the actual keyword in a query in a search engine that leads to your site (imported from Google analytics), this feature would simulate the top search queries feature in Google Webmaster tool.
Wish all the best for RONK CHECKER! (sorry i just can't see the A...)
there already is a bulk upload feature, though not for text files...you simply write one keyword per line and the URL for all of them once at the top.
We may add graphing and other stuff down the road.
Hi Aaron,
New to your site, impressed, and appreciative! Thanks.
Is it just me or is the Live search not returning rankings?
I've been testing it off and on this evening and can't seem to ever get a result shown for Live, even when I know the top ranked site for the search.
Let me know please.
Thanks :)
Live just worked for me.
Live works for me too...
It won't return a result if it has the problem I've outlined above, or if you aren't ranked I believe.
Can I request that the Domain Name be added as the first column in the export file?
Also, for consistency you may want to label the column headings as Google Rank, Yahoo Rank, Live Rank, instead of Google Position.
Changing from 20 to 100 domains will be really useful.
Thanks so much for this tool!!
it worked once and stopped.
now the buttons "start" and "export" are grey.
how can i make it work again ?
thanks
How can I work with it without having Firefox?
you can't
Hi Aaron,
First chance I've had to see that you responded to my question about not getting results for Live. I just tried again and still no result.
Here's an example, search for "indian artifacts"(without the quotes) for the domain www.indianartifacts.com and it's number one in Live but shows no result in Rank Checker (at least for me it doesn't).
I really want to be able to use the tool to check all 3 major engines. Is it just me or ? I'm using Windows Vista with the latest version of FireFox.
Thanks.
I've been using this tool for the past few days and everything works perfect!!
Thanks Aaron,
SS
This may be a silly question (sorry if it is)... in order to run the scheduled tasks option does Rank Checker software/extension need to be open, or will it run even if the software is closed please?
So far everything seems to work beautifully on this extension! Thanks for sharing it with us.
Arkadia
I think Firefox needs to be open.
This is a pretty sweet tool from what I have used. I would like to see a "are you sure you want delete XYZ preset"
Mine seemed to have deleted when I double clicked it... I would like to be able to save them to disk, or maybe import a list from excel or text file.
Also it would be nice to be able to get to the options menu from within the program, rather than the firefox menu.
I really like what you have done. Keep the tools coming (c:
Please SEO Gurus
My blog was going swell and I was getting around 30,000 vistis a month which made me happy cuz my blog is just 6 months old. Anyway, all of a sudden 2 days ago, just after my best day, traffic soared down. I checked and I still get ranked high on the term "Ingles Gratis" (free english) but in google.com and not on google.com.mx or many other spanish speaking google data centers. Also, many terms in google.com which brought me traffic also I cannot find em even near the first pages of google. Why did this happen? If they penalized me then why am I still in first page on my main 2 word keyword. Seems like I have been filtered but how can I get back up or should I just wait. Does this ever happen to you guys?
My blog is http://estudiaingles.blogspot.com and it is for spanish speaking people that want to learn english. I took some widgets to see if it helped. Also, lately my page was having problems with internet explorer and I dunno if this has anything to do with it. Any help would be very so much appreciated.
I have been using an online tool at www.rankangel.com that does something very similar to RankChecker - and it is also free :) RankAngel allows you to test how your url ranks in a number of search engines against selcted keywords. You can also create projects that will keep running these tests each day and graph the results. Neat tool - good price - and nothing to install.
Thanks Aaron. You always have something new.
Will give it a try.
Hey Aaron, I liked your tool so muchh !!!!.
I have some troubles with RankChecker. I think it's very strange. We have 2 websites , one DOT COM and other same domain but DOT COM XX ( country ). When we check DOT COM, the tool gets the DOT COM XX results ( SERPS ) , and not the DOT COM results.
we test it with one KW and with multiple KW.
DO U know how fix it ? or some tip ? what is your opinion ? I wait your response ! thanks in advance ! : )
We just did an update that fixed that issue poxi.
my immediate impressions on trying this are that it is very helpful to compiling search engine rankings quickly from firefox - an excellent tool for the professional SEO
I noticed that the times when the searches where made within the CSV that is exported is not correct. It appears to be another time zone. Is there a way to change this?
Thanks, I'll look for your reply.
It's a great program!
- Sean
I just found another bug that I thought would be worth posting. When I export to CSV (for the history export only) I get a CSV that has two of the columns merged together (using newest version of MS Office, aka 2007). The Google URL and the Yahoo Position columns are put together with an NaN between them.
It looks like this:
Google.com URLNaN"Yahoo position"
You can view a screen shot at: http://pittwebsite.com/seo_book_rank_checker.htm
Even with that it's still a great application. Thanks for creating it, it's really useful!
Nice Tool. First, I had to learn, not to write http://. Then it worked. But the results are different from my manual queries, hmm, another DC? And I have no results asking google.de with this tool, only at google.com.
Hey Aaron!
I'm facing this issue and I'm not sure if it is this way for everyone, so here it goes:
Does this rank checker tool has a horizontal scroll bar?
'Cause at least for me it's not showing any and it's quite annoying when I resize any column and the other columns just get smaller and smaller.
I think it would be nice to set a horizontal scroller.
Thanks for your attention and congratulations for this excellent tool!
Hi Aaron, great little rank checker you've built there. I did kind of lose faith with them a few years back and switched to paying more attention to my analytics instead, watching the rank of a few choice keywords every now and again. Glad to say I was getting pretty accurate results back from your tool.
Also liked the presets, really great for making little keyword groups for an individual site.
Tahnks, its a little fine tool. verry simple and effective.
thanks you.
Hi Aaron
I read in earlier comments that you plan on expanding the number of keywords from 20 to 150. When will this be done?
For all our sites we at least 50 keywords so although it is a great tool you have made it is not very helpful if you cannot check all your keywords.
I have to talk to the developer. Am at a conference this week, so time has been a bit scarce.
Aaron,
In my presets, I input the domain with "www". In MSN, I have a number of urls that are indexed without "www". The Rank Checker is missing my urls in MSN due to not seeing "www".
Any help with this would be appreciated.
Thanks,
ryantodd
add www when you enter the domain name. problem solved.
Aaron,
One additional feature needed is the ability to edit existing presets. That would be extremely convenient.
thanks again,
ryantodd
I think you can. Can you open up a preset list, add a keyword, and resave it?
Aaron,
You're correct. An oversite on my part. Thanks again!
ryantodd
Just wanted to throw my vote in to have the length of the keyword list extended to more than 20 :)
Hi, Aaron.
I'm having difficulty with the tool.
I've added the url and keywords, yet the start button at the bottom is grayed out and I can't click on it. Also, the save button is inactive as well as the add button (by inactive I mean nothing happens when I click, they are NOT grayed out though). The only buttons that do work are "open" and "clear." and the options window is also not open as u had mentioned in a earlier comment for this similar problem.
I've tried uninstalling and re-installing to no avail.
I am not running any add-ons on Firefox except this Rank Checker extension, my Firefox Version is 2.0.0.13 & the OS is windows 2000
but still its not working
Any tips?
Thanks,
Satish
Finding the tool very useful, thanks.
As I mentioned earlier, any chance of adding the ability to track top 2 results per domain, instead of only one? It would be extremely useful for me, and I am sure many SEOs could see the benefit.
I just have to prevent the tool from getting too complex too quick. The programmer's wife just had a baby as well, so more programming stuff might take a bit to get going.
Hello,
It would be nice if you could also select more Google extensions so that you could check a dutch word in .nl, .be and the .com version.
Rgds
Dolf
So you want to track 3 versions of Google all at the same time? Right now it is set up to allow 2.
Hi Aaron,
Great tool! however, after using the tool and putting it through some work suddenly I was left with the following parsing error.
XML Parsing Error: unclosed token
Location: chrome://rankchecker/content/processor.xul
Line Number 75, Column 9: --------^
I am using FF3 Beta 5 thinking that might be the culprit I tried on Flock browser and the same thing happened.
Anyone else had this problem?
Handy ranking tool with good accuracy, thanks for making it open source Aaron. It would be helpful to have the number of search results for a keyword phrase shown in the report too. Great tool overall, added links to it on my blog and website.
Thanks for the kind words and mention Daria :)
As far as "number of search results for a keyword phrase shown" do you mean show multiple keywords if there are multiple words from the same site?
Hi Aaron,
Very nice tool: easy to use and apparently precise enough.
There is only one more targetting option I would like to have: While you can select the country (i.e. google.nl vs google.com), you cannot select the language (i.e. &hl=nl vs &hl=en in Google).
Would it be possible to add a drop-down menu to target different languages?
I will talk with the programmer on that Pieter :)
Thanks! And congratulations for his baby!
Er, doesn't this program violate Google's terms of service, in that it automates ranking queries?
Thanks for the free tool!
One problem I seem to be having. I tried to run a scheduled task once a day at 10am, however it does not seem to grab the data.
Does the firefox browser have to be open when it runs?
Are there any tips/suggestions you have to make sure it runs when I ask for it to?
Thanks again
yes firefox has to be open for it to work.
A feature that would be very helpful to me would be able to set up a certain google domain to be tied with each search preset. That way I can schedule queries, but also search on all of my different sites that are targeted to different markets.
For example www.example.com and www.example.de have different keywords that I'm trying to optimize for, but I would like to be able to run these keyword reports once a night. So I could associate www.example.com with google.com and www.example.de with google.de.
Great Tool!
We might look into doing that soon. Seems like a reasonable and good suggestion.
I setup the rank checker to check my ranking daily but it has begun to check an extra time on each day for each keyword. So once on 24th April, twice on 25th, three times on 26th so on.
Anyone else experience this? Or am I doing something wrong?
For some reason the rankings I'm getting (for google at least) are off. I try the same query in google (with pws=0) and my site is ranked 1-4 higher than the tool says. Is it using some specific google data center or something? Maybe it's counting suggested searches or ads at the top of the results?
I don't want to say what my site is here but you can email me for specific examples if you want. jlaing at g mail.
I can not get the Google column to return any results for any me. I clearly am on the first page in the Google SERP for certain keywords, but I only get "-" in rank checker ... is there some setting I'm missing?
Hi Babiesonline
can you mention the keyword and URL and I will give it a look?
Hey Aaron thanks for the tool.
I'm also having problems getting any google.com results but can get google.ca results.
The url is starportgame.com and a keyword is starport which we have rank 1 for.
update: turns out it works on one of my computers and not the other, I tried disabling some other addons but that didn't seem to fix it
Hi!
I really like the tool! Mostly because it's so easy to use. But there are two really annoying things:
1. Ranking Check's window isn't resizable
2. Ranking Check is limited to 100 keywords per cycle
Is it planned to solve this?
Hi Vincent
Eventually we will try to address those issues
cheers
a
Nice tool Aaron. I noticed when I check a term that is ranked #1 in google with site links the results, in the checker it is listed as undefined. If you could fix this small glitch that would be great.
I'm having a problem with rank checker. I have presets set to run every night, but when I go back to my computer in the morning I cannot open the presets or any other tab within the rank checker. Is this a known problem, or am I just doing something wrong?
PS: I have no other ad ons
Did you close out the browser and open it back up...maybe see if it works after doing that.
Is it possible to link to deeplink pages rather than just the domain.
I've tried but the entry box isn't big enough
It is designed for checking the ranking of any page on the associated domain name
"It is designed for checking the ranking of any page on the associated domain name."
I think in 99.99 percent of the cases, this is all you need, and it would probably be adding complexity for not much gain to change this.
On the other hand, in the slightly behind-the-times backwoods of Japan, you'd be amazed at how many local companies still don't have their own domains and are running their company Web sites off of ISP's domains, like www5.isp_name.ne.jp/~my_company_home_page.
Comments on the documentation:
-- You should add something about the scheduling requiring that FireFox be open.
-- [Minor quibble] You could clarify whether 12:00 a.m. is when it's dark or light (and 12:00 p.m.). I can never figure this out without testing! Is there some international standard on this? (Maybe use AM/MIDNIGHT and PM/NOON, or the opposite, whichever is right, in the popup?)
12am is light and 12pm is noon.
If I ever mess this up I think of Peg Bundy offering Al Bundy nooner (which he thinks is lunch meat) but the actual term is for making love at noon. Al comes home and gets no lunch meat. Then Peg is disqualified from the contest for telling Al about it, and he still gets stuck having sex with her, which is something he dislikes in his role.
I am having trouble with RankChecker. At first it was working great for me, but lately it seems to be freezing up.
I cut and paste my keyword terms into the multiple terms box, add them, save them as a preset, then select "Start." The RankChecker seems to successfully check the ranks for the whole list, but then when it gets to the end it seems to freeze there. The icon in the top right keeps showing it is running, and the "Export Results to CSV" and "Start" buttons never become active, off into eternity. I've tried using the "Export History" button to see if it is successfully saving the results, and sometimes the document is blank with only the column headings, other times it shows results for the first 2 search terms only.
Is this a known bug? Am I doing something wrong?
If it was a known bug and many people were experiencing it I am guessing we might be getting more similar comments on the site. Perhaps it has something to do with conflicting extensions or something like that? Though perhaps sometimes issues may arise which require closing your browser and reopening it to clear.
Thanks for the ideas!
Unfortunately it's not a conflicting extension thing, because I only downloaded Firefox onto my computer for the RankChecker extension! Also, I've found that closing and opening the browser doesn't always help. Sometimes I encounter the same problem even after restarting my whole computer. If anyone else has encountered this or has a fix for it, please let me know, because otherwise I love the tool!
OK, I think I just figured it out. The Presets that kept malfunctioning all contained keyword phrases with apostrophes in them (like "master's degree"). The moment I eliminated the apostrophes from the phrases, the tool stopped malfunctioning! I guess those were screwing with the code. =)
thanks for the feedback CaityLady321...I will pass it on to the developer.
Hi there,
I installed RankChecker today, but when I relauched firefox later in the afternoon, I got a message to tell me a new version was available (1.3.9) I was surprised, as my version was 1.3.2, but I clicked "upgrade", and I got an error message, because the hash was incorrect for the file http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/RankChecker.xpi.
Firefox 2.0.0.14, Max OS X.4.11
Thanks.
thanks for the feedback. We will look into this asap.
Hi
First and foremost thanks for this excellent tool. It is much better than marketleap and makes it easy to create a report.
I'm having some trouble saving the historic information with my presets file. Sometimes it works but often it doesn't. I'm finding it very easy to accidentally blank out a file I wanted by overwriting it with just the headings. Right now I can see results for 16 keywords. I open the preset file and hit 'export history to CSV', I choose a filename and hit 'Save'. When I open the file it just shows the headings and has not recorded the results.
Another thing is that often a preset dialog or another dialog gets lost behind other windows on my Mac and is hard to find. Right now I'm clicking 'Open' and nothing is happening. I'm guessing because the window is hidden somewhere. Ah yes, I just minimised 10 windows and found it.
This is a great tool. I hope you will continue working on it. I'm a bit of a UI person so shout if I can help.
I'd be happy to pay for a tool like this.
Carl
Hi Carl
Thanks for the UI tips. I think we could still use a bit of work on that front. So far we have been focused more on core functionality than making it perfect from a UI standpoint.
Hi Aaron,
I'm using rank checker quite a bit today. i just ran it twice on the same domain. The first time the keyword ranked 43 and when I rank it a second time it ranked 111. It's dropped massively - is this because of what I'm doing with rank checker?
Thanks
Carl
Rank Checker has no way to destroy your rankings...you are not even passing your URL to Google so how could they do that? I mean if they did that all you would need to do is rank check for competitors all day long and eventually you would rank #1 ;)
The idea of this tool is great and all that, but it doesn't discover the rank correctly. When I tried to feed a list of my keywords 90% of it was discovered incorrectly.
Correctly was discovered only keywords which ranked me for first place.
What's the deal? Is it some kind of fix that you guys are working on right now?
It generally works well for me and most people who use it. Do your keywords have some foreign characters in them or something like that?
Hi Aaron,
I didn't see a response to my post a few weeks back about exporting the CSV file (posted on April 08, 2008 05:29 AM). Let me know what you think.
Been using the tool for sometime now, other than what's mentioned, I love it! Thanks for the great tool.
-Sean
I would like to add that like the user above, I am experiencing the same phenomenon where firefox shows RankChecker as having a new update (version 1.3.9). I would link to the previous comment, but I don't see how to, so just use the browser to find (1.3.9) and you can see that user's comments.
At first, I thought the version was why I no longer was getting rankings from Google. But after reviewing the documentation, I can only conclude that Google temporarily (hopefully) banned my IP from searching.
A nice feature might be to inform the user when a search engine is denying the inquiry (microsoft live is also denying my rank inquiry).
Even though I can't get it to work at the moment, it looks like a great tool. Thanks for your efforts!!
Aaron,
I don't use any foreign or special characters. Plain English :)
strange....why it doesn't work for me.
I was having trouble getting Google and Windows live to give me search results with Rank Checker. The solution? I was typing the address wrong. I was typing the SUBDOMAIN (www.productivecorp.com) when the program ONLY works with the DOMAIN (productivecorp.com).
I think this is a MAJOR issue that would explain why several of the commentators above cannot get search results like everyone else.
Some kind of TEXT next to the entry spot or a feature notifying the user would be nice. Only Yahoo was able to understand that when I typed the subdomain that I wanted it to look at the domain.
Hi Aaron, your rank checker tool is great and for the last 2-3 weeks I have been watching some sites at least once per day and sometimes more frequently.
For a couple of days, I then experienced a problem installing the latest update. But that seems to be resolved by uninstalling and then reinstalling.
Then, last night I was demonstrating the tool to somebody and ran many searches in the space of an hour.... BAD MOVE!
I now seems to be banned by Yahoo. Anybody else experienced this and if so, how long does the ban last (if its only a couple of days, I wont bother to try to circumvent the ban, if its longer then I may have to).
Strangely, I had installed the free version of Web CEO, so I tried using that and it worked for the same domain names.
And I have tried doing individual searches on Yahoo and that works. Its just Rank Checker not working Hmmm confused
Any ideas?
Hi Neil
I have had an IP blocked by Yahoo! many times over the years. It is usually just for a couple hours.
Hi Aaron, your rank checker tool is really awesome. I really liked it. For the last 1 - 2 months I have been using this tools and now it is very easy to find and website with particular keyword. But today I was having trouble to getting Windows live search results. For all the keywords it is showing blank in the live search result column. Then I scared and feel that my site ranking gone from Live. To confirm this I searched the particular keyword manually in Live.com and it is showing within top 10 result. So I think this problem with Rank Checker tool. Is it a bug with Rank Checker?
Shimul
For some crazy reason I am not getting results for MSN (Live) whenever I run the rank checker software. Any idea why this is occurring? Secondly, I am trying to validate my Yahoo placements, and I've noticed twice that the Rank Checker result varied from the actual search result. Any idea why this is occurring?
My "Live" results have also stopped working in Ronk Checker. I know they are not important and nobody really likes Microsoft, but its sorta need to see the stats anyway. :P
Can you try msft now? We just did an update.
I think we might be pulling data from the Yahoo! API. In some cases there are variances between what that shows and what shows up in the search results.
Great the tool was update and this seemed to fix almost all of the bugs I reported a while back - thanks man :]
Is there anyway to make it search on local page only?? like cr=countryHK
Hi Gulflee
We will have to look into that in the coming month
cheers
a
LOVE this plug in.
But my FF2.x (on WinXP SP3) has been trying to do an auto-update for over a month, and every time it tries to do the update it encounters a "xpi file hash error" that nukes the browser.
Don't know where this auto-update module is hosted, but please fix it! Updating directly (manually) from this site works fine, but the auto-update cycle has made for an annoying series of FF crashes. The temporary work-around was to run FF in Safe mode, but the only real solution was to manually grab the upgrade file here.
(this is a dupe of mouloud's June 8 post, but I wanted to make sure everyone knew that [1] it's been a problem for a while and [2] it's still an issue).
We just did an update which fixed most of the errors people were having
http://www.seobook.com/announcing-firefox-rank-checker#30498
could you consider uninstalling and reinstalling the extension to see if that fixes the bug for you?
After running a bunch of Google searches with the new extension, with a 2 second delay, I now get the Google sorry screen sometimes when I do searches manually from Firefox. Has this happened to other people, and how long will this continue? Are there are guidelines for how often you can use the tool without getting Google upset?
Google sometimes cracks down on automated queries and then sometimes they are faily loose with it. Even after they crack down you can usually search again within an hour if you put seo for firefox in the inactive state, though getting google cache to work can take a few more hours after that.
Can I add somehow Google.hu (Hungarian version of Google) to the list?
Hi Merras
Google.hu is already there under the options settings :)
Yahoo Japan is missing from the list of Yahoo domains
We might have to do some special coding for that as it is not as integrated into their global search as some other locations are. I think Yahoo! Japan being a market leader and a quasi-separate company makes some of their search result footprints a bit different.
I know this is very minor, but I'd love to be able to resize the window ;)
Also, in FF3, Rank Checker doesn't seem to be working for Google :C
We will have to test it for Firefox 3 soon. Sorry about that.
I have just downloaded rank checker and it is giving results which are just plain wrong! I have set prefs for .co.uk and put in the usual keywords and positions are almost off the radar when in fact on a live search my site is ranking positions 3 through 13 on various keywords. have I missed something???
do you normally have personalized search turned on? if so, that typically skews your rankings higher for you (but not for everyone)
This is great, I'm trying to implement it to coincide with a PPC campaign, so I can remove ads that have good organic rankings, etc. The export of CSV files is great, I'm new to the format so am not sure if I'm using it correctly. Is there any reason that when the history is exported that the domain and keyword are only listed once, while the SERP and url (etc) are listed every time? Reason I ask is that in order to create tracking charts, every SERP and date needs to have a keyword associated with it (on the same row). Or, maybe I'm just not using the exported file correctly. Any thoughts? Thanks!
In FF3, when I set the Delay Between Queries to "2" and close the options box, the next time I open it, it is back to "0".
All other options, are saved correctly when re-opened.
This was brought up in an earlier post, but will there be a character limit increase on the URL string?
I have no problem searching the domain but I need to specifically check up to 50 different pages and they all have different targeted keywords.
You can just put the root URL into the tool...no need to list the individual pages.
as a further to my previous comment, the project that I setup, which ran fine, did not store any of the data (domain or keywords) so that when I opened Rank Checker up again it was completely blank.
I'm using FF3 on Windows Vista, it is probably a Vista issue, sounds like it is unable to write data...is there a setting or something I need to do to make it work?
I just can't get this to work well. I add 9 separate keywords, save the file, hit start, get the data. Then, all buttons are grayed out. I am left to close and reopen Rank Checker. When I pull the save file, I only have 5 keywords.
This has happened on Vista laptop and XP desktop with FF2 and FF3.
I'd love to get RC to work! It looks awesome!
Thanks!
Mommamia8 - I had this same problem and discovered that it happened whenever I had an apostrophe in one of my keywords. All of the presets that I had saved with a keyword with an apostrophe bugged in the exact way you described. Is that the case for you? If so, try resaving a preset without the apostrophes and see if that helps.
This is great. Like to reiterate that at some point I hope the ability to look at a directory or page level can be added. For example, if we're testing specific page/keyword combos, there may be other pages on the domain that still rank higher for that keyword and as far as I can tell RC would never show the test page since it stops after the first occurrence. Furthermore for multi-country sites, like to be able to check just the specific country directory (eg www.company.com/us vs. www.company.com/uk)
Great work though.
Aaron,
I love your tool and use it on a daily basis. Thanks for continuing to keep open source projects moving forward and for sharing them with the rest of us.
Do you think it would be possible to display the total number of results next to the rank for each site within each SE so that people can view where they stand within the overall rankings for the particular phrase/word?
Keep up the great work!
Hi DS
Thanks for the kind comment.
I am trying to avoid getting bogged down in complexities, though we might add some new features soon. It is hard to decide how many features to add vs how complex we want to let the tools become.
Hiya Aaron -
Loving the tool! Just wondering, I'm moving to a new computer and would like to transfer the historical ranking data that is saved in the Rankchecker, along with my presets. Where exactly is that data stored?
c: / documents and settings / my username / application data / mozilla / firefox / profiles / someweirdstring / rankchecker.sqlite
I think application data was a hidden folder
and
someweirdstring is like brm9cmz3.default
Hey Aaron,
Thought you might be interested a post I just wrote with a side-by-side comparison of your Firefox Rank Checker and some other free and paid software. Your tool got my recommendation, and I will make the switch soon. Thanks for giving away some seriously useful stuff that I was paying too much money for.
http://www.yoursearchadvisor.com/blog/search-engine-ranking-software-com...
Andrew
Hi Aaron,
Great tool -- love & appreciate it!
However, with Firefox 3 it no longer saves the "Delay Between Queries" setting.
This has been noted before in these comments without a response, so I thought I'd mention it again to draw your attention to it.
This can, of course, result in incomplete results from being temporarily banned by the search engines.
Thanks!
My site has a complex search term wordlist that I generated via Google Adwords. Could we change the "add multiple keywords" max from 100 to 500? If there is a downside to adding more word capacity, please respond as to why.
We limited the number to make users less likely to get banned for pulling many search results at once. We may expand it soon though.